Schedule: Organizational infrastructure sessions

Many people experience occupational burnout at some point in their career, but there are many misconceptions of what burnout actually is. Combining current research on occupational burnout with a personal story of burning out and returning to health over the course of 12 months, Avleen Vig discusses the nature, causes, symptoms, and impacts of burnout, as well as ways to recover from it.
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Software developers have a lot on their plate today. Besides their core programming work, they are immersed in marketing, support, and other activities and must continuously switch contexts—a process brains struggle with that university doesn’t prepared you for. Arianna Aondio shares her experience and explores the technologies she uses to overcome these issues.
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The Grand National always breaks records by every metric at Sky Betting & Gaming, one of the UK's largest online betting websites. Kevin Bowman offers a from-the-trenches perspective of how Sky Betting & Gaming planned for and ran the busiest day of the sports betting year and the lessons learned that will make next year even better.
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Of the myriad challenges in scaling up an engineering organization, onboarding new employees is probably the least understood. Tomer Gabel explains the onboarding process at Wix Academy, an engineer-driven training organization, during its first year of operation, covering lessons Wix learned and the solutions it developed along the way.
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In the world of microservices, when things are moving fast and constantly breaking, the accepted wisdom is that teams must own the whole stack and operate their services themselves. But how do we ensure that operational standards are consistent across the organization? And how much stack is the whole stack? George Sudarkoff explains how to distribute operations in a consistent and efficient way.
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Successful DevOps means empowering teams. But you still have things you want all teams to do, and you need to balance the benefits of the right technologies against the costs of running multiple data stores, deployment platforms, languages, etc. Sarah Wells offers a brief overview of nudge theory and explores its possibilities for influencing disparate teams to do things for the common good.
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LeaseWeb has started a transition toward a more Agile and empowered engineering culture. Arnoud Vermeer offers a summary of things LeaseWeb did to foster the change, the impact they had, and lessons learned along the way.
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Stop multitasking. Don't treat your workstation as your best friend. Use your problem-solving skills to drive organizational change. Marta Paciorkowska explains how understanding the relationship between software engineers, "the regular folk," and the software they use can improve your organization and help break down barriers between different departments and within teams.
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Everything changes at scale. Launching products at a scale of 1+ billion users requires a massive cross-team, cross-functional, coordinated effort, and business, engineering, and cultural challenges must be overcome. Kishore Jalleda and Gopal Mor explain how they have applied DevOps best practices at scale to successfully launch several high-profile products at Yahoo.
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Sky Betting & Gaming bought into the DevOps philosophy years ago. During that time, the business has changed radically, going from 250 to 1,000 employees with >30% growth year on year. Michael Maibaum describes how the DevOps function has changed repeatedly over the last few years to help the company continue to move fast and keep systems operating through organizational and technical challenges.
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Not all web applications are deployed to Linux or the cloud. Building and deploying for clients with traditional IT departments is challenging, and ensuring we can deploy with confidence within unusual infrastructures and IT constraints requires flexibility. Rob Allen explores these complexities and shares some solutions.
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Schuberg Philis is an innovative business technology company focused on the mission-critical applications that its customers and society rely on 24/7. As Schuberg Philis was growing, the company had to figure out how to keep its coaching model sustainable. Lotta Croiset van Uchelen explores the solution it landed on: every colleague can choose their own boss.
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Many organizations struggle to maintain effective on-call rotations that minimize the number of people woken up in the middle of the night—so much so that “burnout syndrome” is an actual disorder experienced by professionals in on-call positions. Amanda Folson explains how you can set up your on-call rotations to optimize the uptime of your infrastructure and your engineering team.
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What happens when a "little fish” company is acquired by a “bigger fish” company? How hard is it to bring two company cultures together and make newcomers feel welcome? Paula Kennedy shares her recent experience with acquisition and highlights lessons learned on inclusion, culture, and values when “new” meets “existing.”
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An increasing number of organizations large and small are working with distributed and remote teams. Working with people in other time zones has some great benefits but also brings with it a lot of challenges regarding communication. Mathias Meyer talks about the challenges he’s come across building a remote team at Travis CI and shares what the team has learned along the way.
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